A Summary and Analysis of Maggie Smith’s ‘Good Bones’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Good Bones’ is the best-known poem by the contemporary American poet Maggie Smith (born 1977) and the title poem of her third full-length poetry collection, Good Bones (2017).

First published in 2016, the poem reflects on the negative aspects of life, such as its brevity, and how the speaker of the poem endeavours to shield these harsh realities from her young children.

Summary

The speaker of the poem observes that life is short, but she tells us that she doesn’t tell her children this. She also endeavours to keep them in the dark about the various ways she has shortened her own life (perhaps through poor dietary choices, as the repetition of ‘delicious’ and ‘deliciously’ implies).

Indeed, the speaker of the poem (who may or may not equate one-hundred per cent with Maggie Smith herself) believes that the world is at least half bad, or ‘fifty percent terrible’, although it’s probably even worse than that. This fact, too, she hides from her children.

She then elaborates on her ‘fifty percent’ claim: for every child in the world who is loved and well looked-after, there is a child who has been mistreated, neglected, or even thrown in a sack and drowned. For every kind person we meet, there is another stranger who wants to do us harm.

The speaker confesses that she’s trying to ‘sell’ the world to her children: that is, she’s trying to make them think of it as a nice place, rather than a half-bad (or worse) place to live. It’s like a realtor or estate agent showing a prospective buyer or tenant around a potential home that is in bad condition, but that realtor insists on talking up the potential of the property.

Such a realtor talks happily about the ‘good bones’ of a place: the basic structure is sound, and the property just needs a bit of work, in other words. Smith’s speaker echoes the words such a person might speak: this place could potentially be a beautiful one, if the owner or renter put in the work.

Analysis

Much of Maggie Smith’s poetry acknowledges the darker or less pleasant aspects of the world while also offering a positive or upbeat message. The world may be ‘at least’ half bad, full of people who seek to break us, but there is also kindness in the world, and we have the potential to make it a better place. She often incorporates her children into her poetry in order to reflect the contrast between the knowing adult – who is aware of the horrors the world contains – and the innocent, naturally optimistic child.

Of course, the child’s view of the world should be the correct one. But to persist in a state of dogged positivity and blinkered idealism would be to fail to prepare oneself for the more challenging aspects of living which we will all have to deal with in time: that our time on earth is short, for instance, and that human beings often do small, self-destructive things as a means of coping with the challenge of making it from one day to the next (those ‘thousand deliciously ill-advised ways’ the speaker has shortened her life).

The poem’s main point, though, is that there is plenty of time to discover the truth about the world when we get older. When we’re young, we should be shielded from this, not just because children are not resilient enough to deal with too many of the horrors of ‘adult’ living, but because one of the ways we can make the world better is by instilling the hope in the younger generation that the world can be better than it actually is. If, as T. S. Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality, children can bear even less, nor should they have to bear the weight of their parents’ woes (and those of other grown-ups).

So in ‘Good Bones’ we have the adult’s ‘less deceived’ voice telling us, the reader, what we both know: that the world is not all sunshine and roses. But at the same time, we have a reminder that we shouldn’t seek to rob young children of the belief that the world could be a kinder, more beautiful place; to do so would be to ensure that the world never improved.

Of course, this involves lying, at least on some level. Smith’s comparison between herself and the disingenuous realtor trying to ‘sell’ a property – which they know is poor quality – to a naïve would-be owner acknowledges the truth: that she is not merely seeking to preserve her children’s innocence but actually trying to increase it: she is actively attempting to prevent her children from seeking the cracks in the world which, as we quickly grow up (life is short, remember), become all-too-rapidly apparent.

Like the realtor who is keen to make a sale and earn their commission, Smith – or her speaker – is aware that she, too, will benefit from ‘selling’ this idea of a better world to her children. If we teach the next generation to be kinder, everyone will benefit from that.

Here it’s worth comparing ‘Good Bones’ with another of Maggie Smith’s poems, ‘First Fall’, in which she carries one of her young children through the early dawn and shows them the autumn trees and leaves during their first autumn/fall on earth. In that poem, having shown her child ‘the only things’ her child yet knows in the world as they ‘begin to end’, Smith’s speaker tells her child: ‘The first time you see / something die, you won’t know it might / come back.’

Being a parent is about reassuring them that it will, and giving them hope that a better world is possible, even if this means adopting the dishonest ‘chirping’ of the estate agent.

Form

‘Good Bones’ is unrhymed, and there is no regular metre or rhythm to the lines. However, the poem is not truly free verse because the lines are all of a roughly similar length, suggesting that Smith may have had blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, in mind as the loose ‘ground plan’ for her poem.

Blank verse, because it’s unrhymed and iambic pentameter is close to the rhythms of ordinary English speech, is a suitable form for the poem, given the conversational manner in which Smith addresses us. Like other Maggie Smith poems, it wears its formal structure lightly, we might say: those repeated phrases (‘though I keep this from my children’, ‘life is short’) are the kinds of statement people might choose to repeat for rhetorical effect, even in everyday speech or an ordinary conversation.

Similarly, although the poem is unrhymed, there are two occasions where two consecutive lines end with the same word: ‘ways’/‘ways’ and ‘beautiful’/‘beautiful’. However, these function slightly differently: the first expresses a kind of gentle, self-effacing glee the speaker takes in recounting (without actually detailing) the myriad ways she has shortened her own life through poor (though enjoyable) health choices.

The second, however, is more ambiguous. Does the repetition of ‘beautiful’ and the ends of the poem’s final two lines lend the poem’s ending an air of finality and definitiveness, or do they reveal the speaker’s own lack of conviction in what she is ‘selling’ to her children? The effect is poised between a rhetorical effect designed to emphasise a persuasive point (the world could be beautiful, it really could) and a gesture of hesitation on the part of the speaker (the world could be beautiful, surely it could be … couldn’t it?).

In favour of the latter reading, we might cite that suggestive colloquial ‘right?’ which precedes the caesura or mid-line pause in the poem’s last line. It’s the sort of thing a realtor would say to a potential buyer to encourage them to voice agreement; but that question mark might alternatively be read as a sign of the speaker’s true feelings: that the world could be beautiful but probably won’t be made so any time soon.